


Celestial Navigation

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [23]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 2021 US Presidential Inauguration, M/M, Reflections on growth and change, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:20:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28892799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “...even if that hope is just a shimmering phantom on the horizon, it’s proof that the horizon exists. It’s proof of atherethat, at minimum, is nothere.”—“Trash Vortex,”October 2019
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273
Comments: 36
Kudos: 62





	Celestial Navigation

Barricades everywhere. It’s hard to tell: Is this a city fortified against overthrow, or a city enchained by its own indecision?

Eponine picks them up at the airport, and after that, they walk. Avoid private cars. Avoid public spaces. Avoid crowds. Because despite everything, there are crowds. 

The forbidding steel barriers help, actually. No way in except on foot, so when they aren’t jammed with hordes of National Guard troops, they can walk down the middle of the street.

“Are you sure?” Enjolras asks, attempting to convey an ease he does not feel as he re-enters this conversation they’ve had a couple dozen times over the last month or so.

In the middle of a vacant bus lane, Grantaire turns on him. “You gotta stop asking.”

“I just want to—” 

“Stop asking,” Grantaire says, and kisses him. “I’m sure.”

*

He’d sort of kept it a secret, up until after the insurrection.

“Don’t envy you getting out of this city,” Darren said the next morning from the floor of Lamarque’s outer office, where he was sorting ransacked papers into piles. “How do I know which ones go to you again?” he called over his shoulder to Chida.

“They all go to her,” Enjolras said from another corner, right as Chida confirmed, from her desk, “All of ’em. Just bring the whole ungodly mess right here.”

She had assured them none of it was _important_ important—that’s what the walls of locking file cabinets are for—but that also none of it was trash. 

“I’ll be back for Inauguration,” he added, stacking a heap of travel receipts and proposed legislation and Capitol Hill takeout menus.

“You don’t have to,” the senator said, hustling out of her office to go castigate some terrible people on the Senate floor. 

“We’d love to have you,” Chida expanded, her eyes sparkling with laughter over the mask. Working around the heaps on her desk, she was lifting papers from the printer and fitting them into a black portfolio. “I’m sure Senator Lamarque means—”

The senator laughed too. Being in a hurry makes her brusque. “It’s a long journey, and the virus.” 

“I kind of made a plan with Grantaire. A while ago.”

“What kind of plan? Everything’s closed. You’re not getting my inauguration tickets, young man.”

Perhaps the mask would obscure what had to be a distinct flushing of his cheeks. He hadn’t thought this conversation through, and suddenly, it was far too much about him. “Um.” 

“Oh my god,” Darren exclaimed. “You popped the question!”

“I—” Finding the phrase kind of gross, Enjolras didn’t really want to say _no, he did_ —and he also wasn’t sure how to respond in the negative without being dishonest.

Kristen stuck her head in from the storage annex. “You’re getting married?” 

“We’re... Grantaire asked me a while ago. He thought Inauguration Day, City Hall. Kind of symbolic.”

“No,” said Lamarque. “Absolutely not.” Sternly, she picked up the filled portfolio from Chida and flipped through to apprise herself of its contents. The others waited, watching, because she couldn’t really be saying no to a _wedding_ , could she? She clapped the portfolio closed. “I will not have my speechwriter in harm’s way on his wedding day.”

“No, they’re only doing them remotely,” Enjolras protested. “We won’t even be there—” 

“But that’s even worse.” She shook her head, a deliberate gesture that flung a thousand puzzle pieces into place. “No, here’s what we’ll do. If the weather’s clear, we go to the park. I’m putting you up at the good hotel, so if it’s bad out, their atrium will do just fine.”

“You mean—”

“Email Darren the particulars. You will not be married by a stranger, Enjolras.” Portfolio in hand and Chida at her side, Lamarque strode out of the offices, letting the door behind her announce the finality of her decision.

From the annex, Kristen snorted. “You will be married by your _boss_.”

“Congratulations, Enjolras,” said Darren, who, Enjolras suddenly remembered, was also planning a wedding. “What are your colors?”

*

“I don’t think I have the clothes for this,” Grantaire had said in sudden consternation a few weeks ago. 

“As I understand it, people often go shopping specifically for the occasion. I thought maybe we could—”

“But like, months in advance. Lots of months.”

 **Enjolras:** Where do we get wedding suits?

 **Courfeyrac:** Hahahaha

 **Courfeyrac:** Airport gift shop?

 **Enjolras:** We still have a couple weeks!

 **Courfeyrac:** You’re fucked

 **Courfeyrac:** Except if you have knowledgeable and well-connected friends

 **Courfeyrac:** I assume pret-a-porter will be acceptable

 **Enjolras:**???

 **Courfeyrac:** Lemme make a call

Courf’s friend’s boutique, it turned out, was able to squeeze them in for private fittings. 

“You want me to go at the same time, or two separate visits?” Enjolras asked, muting himself while he checked in with Grantaire. 

“Together’s fine. No secrets here.”

At the fitting, Grantaire shooed Enjolras from the room. “You have to stop having opinions.”

“They all look great.”

“Yeah, but they’re not what I want. I need to figure out what I want. Without you there.”

The consternation hung over his face thick as his grown-out curls. Enjolras felt like he had to ask: “Are you sure you want us to do this?”

“Just give me ten minutes!” he said, exasperated. “I’m not calling off the wedding. I just need to talk with a guy about a very specific kind of suit.”

*

The night before, they are dotty with delight. In their fancy, old-fashioned elegant rooms at Lamarque’s “good hotel,” not the “business hotel” where she usually puts up her out-of-town staff, they stay up late checking news, drinking wine, and distractedly, making out. 

Enjolras picks up his phone, says in annoyance,“He really just—” then cuts off. “No, not going to talk about that with you right now.” 

“But what if _I_ see and tell _you_?”

“Oh, that’s fine. Then, it’s your choice.”

*

He is up before the alarm clock, of course. His whole self is alive with the knowledge of change, aflutter with possibility, and anxious—so anxious—about all the things that can and will happen today. He showers and dresses quietly. The new suit, chosen in part for its similarity in cut to Grantaire’s favorite of his suits, fits warm and snug.

In front of the mirror, he pulls back his hair and eyes himself. He looks good, he guesses. He looks a lot older than he remembers, when he tries to see himself in his mind. In these last years, he has lived in this body differently than in the time before, and his surface shows the marks: the skin taut like an often-played drum, its resilience no longer theoretical.

If everything goes to plan, where will his feelings go? How does it feel when a steady hand holds the tiller of government? After the initial satisfaction of watching the billowing sails catch the wind, how quickly does the thrill wear off? And when it does, when we find the water still choppy, the breadth of these isolating seas still formidable, how do we again calibrate our bearings to the righteous fury by which we’ve navigated thus far?

The alarm clock interrupts him. It’s for Grantaire, who is fully immersed in this extraordinarily comfortable hotel bed, so Enjolras lets it ring till R hears. 

“Aaaah fuck, the alarm, can you tell the alarm to go fuck itself.”

“You’ve got to get up.”

“This is stupidly early.”

“Are you or are you not the one who said ‘We wed at dawn’?” 

The bed barely shifts as Grantaire rolls away to burrow in the blankets again. “Like I said,” he mutters. The alarm keeps ringing.

When Enjolras emerges from the bathroom, the bed is empty. Perched on the edge of the armchair, Grantaire’s long back arches forward to tie a shoe.

The early light is not yet strong enough to illuminate the room; in the dim quiet, a desk lamp brightens the space just around Grantaire. From across the space, Enjolras watches the careful fingers loop twice, push through, tug the narrow waxed shoelace tight before Grantaire moves over to the other. 

He is being very careful.

“Bathroom’s free,” Enjolras says eventually.

Enjolras’s early-morning energy tends toward giddiness. Grantaire, on the other hand, is heavy of gaze and face, like he’s still caught in the serious and daunting world of dreams.

Pushing up, Grantaire is tall and strong, a dark shape outlined by the rectangle of gray morning that awaits them. “Ready in a minute,” he says.

“Take your time,” says Enjolras, and, looping on a mask, heads downstairs to grab them both some coffee.

In the mirror when he returns, Grantaire assesses himself. The severity of the open-necked white shirt and black suit he’s chosen brightens his eyes. Enjolras wonders about the restraint of the choice, but also approves. Grantaire is wonderful to look at. He needs no decoration. 

“Just one more thing.” From his suitcase, he carefully unwraps a deep red scarf edged with gold, which he folds carefully and drapes over his left shoulder. From behind, it’s an offset column of scarlet that divides the soft blackness of the suit jacket. Grantaire fiddles with the long ends. The gold threads glint.

“Isn’t there supposed to be a knife?” Enjolras has seen enough photos of Grantaire’s cousins’ weddings to know a little about Yemeni wedding traditions. He’s seen Grantaire with a similar long scarf wrapped from left shoulder to come around the right hip and loop over a dagger’s hilt at the front.

Grantaire looks over his shoulder to smile at Enjolras and the coffees that he’s setting on their suite’s wooden dining table.

“Didn’t seem like a great idea to bring a janbiya to Inauguration Day.”

Enjolras wraps his arms around Grantaire from behind so that he can meet his eyes in the mirror. To Enjolras, he looks perfect. To Grantaire, how much is missing?

“Are you absolutely sure—”

“Nope! Stop.” He whirls around, catching Enjolras off balance, and launches him toward the bed. “Not going there again!”

“But there’s no family here! Don’t you want your mom to—”

“This thing we’re about to do doesn’t mean anything to my mom.” He says it like a fact, not a feeling. “It’s not _for_ her.”

“No knife, though.”

“No knife,” Grantaire agrees with a grin. His tone says, _I’ll live._ He pulls Enjolras back to standing and dips his nose to the side of Enjolras’s throat. “You smell great.”

“Am I all wrinkled?”

Grantaire runs his hands down the smooth wool of Enjolras’s suit jacket and lets them linger on his ass. No matter that he’s seen this suit before; his eyes consume it like it’s sustenance. “Who would dare.”

Outside, overcoats and coffee keeping out the chill, they walk briskly to the park—not because it’s any great distance, but because this January morning is cold, and they’re a little jittery, and movement feels like meaning.

Suddenly, Grantaire stiffens, walking very straight. There’s an unnatural rigidity to him.

“What are you—” 

“I don’t love this,” he says tightly, keeping his eyes ahead. Looking around, Enjolras takes in anew the armed troops lining the streets.

Enjolras doesn’t love it either, and he spent his formative years in suburban security. 

“Hey,” he says, hooking his arm through R’s. “We’re going to be okay. There were troops here last time, remember?”

“Last time, I was drunk. And I got arrested!”

Enjolras, devoid of rejoinder, directs them wordlessly off the road and into the broad strolling avenue of the park.

The park’s still wet all over with dew. In this first gleam of day, there’s a crisp, bracing cold. Water drips from the trees; the gravel on the walkway crunches with a rounder crunch, its friction dampened. 

From nowhere, Grantaire says, “Is this a good idea?”

Now, finally, the question. Enjolras resists the urge to remind him that he’s been trying to have this conversation for a _while_ now—that he knows they both have baggage bound up in marriage, in the giving and the taking and the universal balance of who gets to be happy and at what cost—and that Grantaire keeps shutting him down. He doesn’t even make a speech. He doesn’t need one. 

“We get to have nice things,” he says, with the vehemence of the whole unspoken argument behind it.

Grantaire laughs.

“Not getting married!” he says. “I asked _you_ , you will recall. I mean here. Do we really want _this_ behind us while we declare our love?”

The grand buildings and statuary pay tribute to centuries of conquest and inequity. They’re symbols of suppression, icons of nationalist fervor.

And yet, Enjolras really doesn’t care. He met Grantaire in turmoil, and they’ve tempered this love in a conflagration of rights and values— _where_ they get married just doesn’t fucking matter, because what they have keeps proving itself stronger than every bad thing. 

They will live in bad times.This marriage doesn’t end anything. And yet, their marriage isn’t about politics, or the arc of national leadership or might. Maybe they can leave the monuments out of the photos.

“I like this tree,” Enjolras says, pointing to one behind them. Shapely in its barrenness, its branches stretch like they’ve known enough winters not to let the cold shake their confidence.

Grantaire studies it.

“Same.” He arches back to look better at the long limbs. “What if—” A few paces bring him to an open space between that tree and another, so that the branches curve toward each other overhead.

The senator, anonymously grand in a long coat and matching face mask, approaches, flanked by aides and her security detail.

“Good morning, Senator,” says Grantaire. “Thank you so much for doing this for us.” 

“The honor is mine, Grantaire. I would be devastated to miss it.” Briskly, she gestures to their patch of grass below the stark, reaching trees. “Here?” She doesn’t have time to dick around. 

Producing from her handbag a customary black portfolio, she moves into place between them and sets to it.

Other than her guards, there are just a handful of attendees here, and each of them has a job. Chida gathers Senator Lamarque’s handbag and rearranges her scarf, which has blown astray, before moving back to watch. As self-appointed videographer, Eponine is livestreaming to the crew back home, who will have gathered in the Musain to watch. Kristen, who nodded appraisingly at the choice of background, is snapping stills. Jehan, perfectly still, only watches.

“We gather together on this day of change that we may join together two dear persons in the state of matrimony.” She pauses, looking from Enjolras to Grantaire. 

Enjolras isn’t sure whether he’s looking at her or at Grantaire or what; the light dances through the trees, and he sees Grantaire’s serious, bright eyes on his and the senator’s, and he feels all the eyes so much more intently than he’s ever felt eyes on him before, even when he was on stage speaking, because this isn’t about any cause at all. This is just about him, and about what he wants, and about this person he wants to be with who, for whatever incredible reasons, wants him in return.

"Speaking personally, it has been a great pleasure for me to watch you two grow together. When I first met each of you, you were brash young men. Brash in different ways, but brash nonetheless. And so it has been wonderful—not shocking, just wonderful—to watch you mellow each other as you move forward. 

“So today is a day of change, yes, but it will also be a day of continuity—a day of continued love and dedication and strength. Enjolras, I imagine that you have a few words.”

The collective burst of laughter helps Enjolras recenter enough to speak. “I do,” he says. “But I think maybe Grantaire wanted to go first.”

“Excellent,” she says. “That is why this marriage meets with my approval.” 

R squares his shoulders. “I’m not a professional talker,” he says, then catches himself. “No disrespect intended to the professional talkers.”

“None taken, Grantaire.”

R doesn’t have notes. He just stands still for a moment, a stark tree trunk at his back, dry earth grounding him in the stillness even as wind flings his hair wildly loose around his face. “Enjolras,” he says. Enjolras bites his tongue so he won’t cry from the seriousness. “You told me you wanted to feel things. Turns out, so did I. With you, my feelings aren’t something to run from or laugh about or shove away. They’re worth something. And so, with you, I guess it made me see I’m worth something. I knew you were. Fuck.” He laughs and clears his throat, because his voice guttered on that _fuck_. “I should talk about you.”

“You don’t have—”

“It’s still my turn!” The hand that he puts out to reclaim his time claims Enjolras’s hand, too. “You are hopeful and passionate and not scared that it’s stupid to be hopeful and passionate, which means you’re brave. You live bravely. You care so much. You want to be right, but more than that you want to do right. I admire you and I like being with you and I love you.” His fingers hold tight. Enjolras doesn’t know if that glimmer of moisture in Grantaire’s eyes is the cold or if he, too, is fighting to keep his voice steady and his tears inside.

The notes he brought stay in his pocket. They weren’t quite right, and anyway, now he knows what he wants to say, even if he hasn’t quite formed the sentences yet.

He squeezes back. “You told me, Grantaire, ‘Evade despair.’ That’s what you said. It’s been there with me, every moment I’ve known you. You give of yourself so readily, so generously, so unreservedly, that it’s hard for you to recognize that you even do it. Four years ago, you asked me if I had ever loved, and I thought—I really thought I had. I thought I knew what that word meant, thought that it was a measurable, containable, constructible set of feelings that a person could assemble and hold within them. 

“I’d heard that love defies all bounds. I confess, I was certain that was hyperbole—or at the very least, that that was not what love would ever mean for me.

“I was so wrong. I love you. I love you like I love words, like I love to take an idea and turn it into something that can be heard and felt and carried inside of other people, because that’s what you do to me. You’ve taken the idea of me and refined it into something that makes sense and feels whole."

He laughs. “I hope you weren’t worried no one would talk about me.

“You’ve tested and tried me and made me better, and I know it’s a journey, I know there’s a long way to go, but I think we have shown that we’re worthy to accompany each other the rest of the way.”

Their rings, unadorned by anything but newness, shine in the palm of the senator’s glove. 

It’s only cold for an instant; once it’s slipped into place, it takes on his own body’s heat right away like it belongs there, like it’s part of him.

“Looks good on you,” Grantaire murmurs before he’s had a chance to say the same, but really, it does. He sees him in a new light, this serious man who’s made serious, long-term choices for the life he intends to live.

“If you will do me the kindness of saying a few more words,” Lamarque says, and leads them out of the ceremony and into a state of marriage.

They’ve barely finished kissing when Chida has out the marriage certificate for all necessary parties to sign. “Apologies for the hurry,” she says, as Jehan witnesses with a flourish. “However, the senator does have a few engagements this morning.”

Very carefully, Senator Lamarque places the completed marriage certificate in the portfolio, then her gloved hand tugs out an envelope, which she hands over before stepping away. 

“I have been asked to pass along this note of congratulations.”

Enjolras is too bowled over by the unexpected volume of these feelings that he doesn’t think much about the thick envelope as he lifts its creamy flap and pulls out the embossed notecard inside.

“Holy—” Grantaire catches himself. Despite the occasional misstep, he aims for decorum around the senator. “Is this—?”

It’s not one of the mass-printed congratulations cards that incoming White House staff will be churning out by the thousands. It’s hand-written, first in one familiar firm hand:

_Enjolras and Grantaire,_

_You are what is right with America. Blessings to you in your marriage._

And then another:

_Sorry to miss your big day! As you can imagine, we’re a little busy, but we are overjoyed for you!_

At the bottom, two of the most powerful signatures in the world anchor the sentiments in confident lines and loops of a bright, hopeful blue.

“I know some people,” Lamarque nods.

“ _I_ know some people,” corrects Chida, grinning in her eyes.

Lamarque laughs in acknowledgment of this truth.

Enjolras can’t help it. He starts to cry. 

Turns out everyone else is right there with him. 

*

With blurry thanks, they bid the senator and her team farewell, then eat an impromptu park breakfast procured by Jehan from a nearby bakery before he and Eponine scoot off to leave them to their own newlywed devices—which turn out to mostly entail a flurry of good food and calls, interspersed with their peregrinations near the Capitol where the hard, river-carved ground beneath their feet hums in orderly chorus with this abnormally uneventful transition.

The blockades are effective enough to deter them from in-person viewing, which is actually reassuring. It won’t be a day of mass infection. It won’t be a day of rioting. This day will go as it should. 

It’s easy to pretend when it’s going so smoothly and looks so good that it’s all been unfucked.

“What if I forget?” he demands. He and Grantaire are on a bench in yet another park, sharing hot chocolate and donuts because they’ve already had breakfast and it’s not time for lunch. “Don’t let me act like everything’s okay.”

“You won’t,” Grantaire says. A little dusting of snow is swirling in the sky around them in a whimsical dance that will never touch down.

Enjolras isn’t sure what to make of this. He turns and kicks his feet up on the bench’s armrest so that he can shove his head into Grantaire’s lap. 

“If you even tried, the senator would be on you in seconds. Anyway, you were mad before. I’ve heard enough about the soapboxing. You’ve been mad the whole time.”

From this vantage, the snowflakes pirouette around R’s head. It’s lovely. He feels, like a warm embrace, the domesticity making him tranquil. “Am I mad now?”

Glove on glove, Grantaire grips his hand. “You don’t have to be mad today.” 

*

Watching the inauguration, he finds himself leaping up to yell at the screen. “You can’t say this is the worst time. Fucking no!” He turns, incensed. “The second they say that shit, they’re opening the gates to a good old ‘back to normal.’ I can’t fucking believe they chose that line. There are a million other ways—” 

He cuts off, because it sounds like at least racism and white supremacy and domestic terrorism are getting called to task. 

And maybe that’s the trick, maybe that’s the trade-off. Maybe if we call this a “rare and difficult hour,” if we pretend this nexus of hatred and oppression and inequality is unique to this moment, we galvanize today’s people to battle the commonplace, entrenched wrongs.

At least in the poetry, we can be more direct. Thank god for poets. 

Grantaire pulls him down to the bed. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“What?”

“You’re still mad,” he explains. His hands slide around Enjolras’s front. “It’s cool. I like you mad.”

“Shh. I want to hear.”

“Really?” He runs a thumb down the outside of Enjolras’s suited leg. The friction of the wool on his skin makes Enjolras shiver and reach for the remote control. 

“Take off these wedding pants and fuck me.”

“Your first time having sex with a married man.”

Grantaire, who looks like he’s on the verge of a correction, lets it go. “My first time having sex as a married man!”

“Fuck you.”

“I know. A storied life.” 

Enjolras didn’t buy a new belt for the occasion; he likes this old one, and feels vindicated in the decision to wear it when Grantaire clicks open the catch and unzips him. 

“Come here,” he says before R has him quite hard, and pulls him to standing. 

Pressed against him in this fine room as a peaceful transition of power occurs mere city blocks away, Enjolras rests his hands on the sides of Grantaire’s stubbled face and leans his forehead forward till they touch there, too. The ring on his left hand suddenly reasserts its presence; he’s a _married man_ and the man he married makes his whole body flare with heat and light.

“God, I love you.”

The words are barely out before Grantaire’s mouth is on his, soft at first but even in its softness, fierce with the disbelieving joy of fulfillment. Soon, the fierceness takes over. 

Enjolras stretches out long, naked under Grantaire’s nakedness, and by holding his hands at their sides, keeps him there, just kissing and grinding into each other until they’re hard and desperate for it, Enjolras’s hair clinging to his cheekbones, Grantaire moaning into his mouth.

Finally, with the strength he could have used to escape at any point, but which still only comes out as a rare treat, he lifts clear of Enjolras’s clutches.

“I’m gonna suck you before I lose my fucking mind.”

“Take this,” Enjolras says, handing him some lube.

With tongue on balls, R teases him, just small surprising licks that make Enjolras jerk with pleasure and wanting, while his fingertips begin to stroke, one after the other, across Enjolras’s ass. When he licks up the shaft, he slides a first finger in and right back out; when he wraps his mouth around the tip of Enjolras’s cock, eyes wide and locked on Enjolras’s own, the finger slides back in and brings along a friend.

Enjolras arches, aching for it, eager for more and telling himself that this eager is good, that this eager means there are more good things in store, and he can wait, he can wait, he can—

“Fuck me,” he gasps. “I need your cock inside me.”

In response, Grantaire sucks him deeper. In Enjolras’s head, the explosions are mounting, bright and momentous, and he wants them, he does, but he wants them with Grantaire. Grasping at whatever parts of R he can reach, he hauls him up his body, drawing R off his cock in the process. It smacks wetly down against his stomach.

“You really want this.” Grantaire teasing him makes his cock twitch, which means it rubs against R’s own hard cock, and the teasing falters because this feels magnificent.

“Jesus fucking Christ, R, I fucking love you.”

“Fuck.”

He slides down just enough to press between Enjolras’s legs. The touch of him sends electric currents zipping through Enjolras’s ass and hips, and he can’t hold back. With legs and arms gripping him tight, Enjolras pulls as Grantaire pushes and the last coherent image he holds before everything yields to color and texture and metaphor is of Grantaire’s dark eyes wide open, joy-stricken, as his lips find Enjolras’s once again.

*

The afternoon takes place mostly in bed. There’s another round of congratulatory phone calls—without video—and heartbursting reactions to very normal presidency news, and hot, rehydrating showers, and more sex. 

After one of these bouts, a polite knocking on the door alerts them to the happy discovery that the senator has sent them a dinner so sumptuous that its delivery and presentation requires two servers. 

In honor of the ostentatiously beautiful, tureened-and-plattered dinner and of Grantaire’s having yanked on his wedding pants and shirt to answer the door, Enjolras dines in his own wedding suit. 

Round as two hands, the wine glasses await the just-opened bottle at their side. There’s even a lighted candelabra. 

“You look so good,” Grantaire says, pouring. He raises a glass. “We should do this again sometime when people can see.”

“Is it ridiculous that we’re here?” Enjolras asks later, flopped halfway across Grantaire on the bed. “We could watch this at home.”

On the screen, famous people sing and less famous people talk about ordinary greatness, and while none can gainsay the overall impact on Enjolras’s bubbling-over emotions, their apartment is equipped with similar access to nationally live-streamed events. The only difference is here, it’s just them in a fancy room with a balcony and a park and a lot of stately buildings in the middle distance.

“Sure,” R says, curling his fingers idly in Enjolras’s hair. “I’m glad anyway.”

“It feels right.”

“It feels right,” Grantaire echoes sleepily.

Then, the final song comes on, and it takes him longer than it should—a good twenty or thirty seconds—before he realizes what this is and what it means. Grantaire’s already tugging him out of bed and toward the balcony.

They get there as the first fireworks light up the night sky. 

They’re followed in preposterously quick succession, a spectacular barrage of pyrotechnic brilliance that fills the night air with dizzying, unyielding, increasing blasts of light and sound that shake loose any lingering concerns about what they’re doing there. This is what. 

Arm around Grantaire’s back, he watches even this demure, unprepossessing day of inauguration give in to a little pageantry, and thinks that this, too, is both ridiculous and right.

*

Propped on the desk inside, an embossed card welcomes them to the new world they’ve entered today. Beyond, out in the renewed dark, the stately buildings glow.

It’s not a happy ever after, because the after will just keep coming.

But it’s absolutely fucking happy.

**Author's Note:**

> This series began as a reaction to the 2016 election, and so as the nation begins to claw its way forward from the devastation that ensued, I am now, at least as a symbol, marking this series complete. I suspect I will add to it a little here and there, but probably less often. 
> 
> God, I hope less often.
> 
> Thank you so much for joining me. It has meant a lot.


End file.
